Feeling stressed? Your mindset could be the secret weapon…
Our expectations about stress dramatically affect how our bodies respond to it. This is where psychological framing comes in. One of the most compelling demonstrations of the power of psychological framing comes from a now-famous study conducted at Harvard University. Researchers studied a group of female hotel room attendants – women who spent their days doing physically demanding work cleaning hotel rooms. Despite their active jobs, many of these workers didn’t perceive themselves as getting much exercise.
The researchers divided the attendants into two groups. They told one group that their daily work was an excellent form of exercise that satisfied the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. They showed them exactly how their work activities, including pushing vacuum cleaners and changing sheets, were burning calories and building strength. The control group received no such information.
Four weeks later, without any changes to their actual work routines, behaviour or lifestyles, the informed group showed remarkable physical improvements. Their weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio and BMI had all decreased significantly compared to the control group. Their bodies had responded to the mere knowledge that their work constituted good exercise. This was more than a placebo effect. It was a profound demonstration of how our expectations shape our physical reality. The hotel workers’ bodies responded differently to the same physical activity simply because they now recognised it as beneficial exercise rather than just work.
The Value Of Negative Emotions
Similarly, our expectations about stress can transform our physiological responses. In a German survey published in 2016, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development found that people who find meaning in unpleasant emotions – recognising that feelings such as nervousness, anger or disappointment can be useful and appropriate – tend to be much happier than those who prefer to eliminate these emotions.
The researchers asked participants to rate various emotions on dimensions including unpleasantness, appropriateness, utility and meaningfulness. Those who saw value in negative emotions showed significantly better physical and mental health outcomes. In fact, the ability to find meaning in unpleasant emotions virtually eliminated the typical association between distress and poor health.
Even when experiencing frequent distress, these individuals recovered more quickly and showed better muscle strength (a general indicator of fitness) than those who viewed negative emotions as merely harmful. This suggests that our mindset about stress and negative emotions can be as important as – or perhaps even more important than – the actual frequency of stressful experiences in our lives.
The Challenge Versus Threat Mindset
Your ability to choose how you respond to potential stressors is far more malleable than you perhaps realise, and has the capacity to powerfully influence both your performance under pressure and your physiological responses. Over the long-term, this can have an impact on your overall health and wellbeing. In a groundbreaking series of studies, Jeremy Jamieson, chair of the psychology department at the University of Rochester, demonstrated that the way we perceive our bodily responses to stress dramatically affects our performance and wellbeing.
Jamieson’s interest in studying our response to stress stemmed from his observations as a student athlete. He noticed how some teammates would get ‘amped up’ and excited before a game but would feel nervous and fall apart before an exam. Both situations were high-pressure, so why was the arousal helpful in sports but harmful in academics?
Reinterpreting The Body’s Stress Signals
Jamieson’s insight was that the different responses came down to how they interpreted their body’s signals. Before sports competition, the racing heart and quickened breathing were seen by the students as energising; however, in the exam hall, these same sensations were interpreted as warning signs of potential failure. These expectations then influenced their performance and became self-fulfilling prophecies.
To test this idea, Jamieson conducted an experiment with students preparing for the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in the United States, a high-pressure exam required for most applications to postgraduate study programs. He arranged for all participants in the study to take a practice exam in the lab. Before taking this practice exam, however, half the participants were given a simple message that took less than a minute to read:
People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardised test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance… If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping.
The other half – the control group – weren’t given any message.
The results were astonishing. This minimal instruction not only improved students’ scores on the mock exam, but also led to better performance on the real GRE months later. The differences were particularly notable in maths, where anxiety typically has the most debilitating effects. In this area, the intervention group scored around 10 per cent better than the control group – a difference that could easily determine university admission outcomes, and potentially the trajectory of someone’s life.
With a little bit of ‘psychological priming’, Jamieson had shifted students’ mindsets from dreading their anxiety to harnessing it as fuel – with immediate and lasting performance benefits. The implication is clear: it’s not the stress itself that determines the outcome, but how you interpret it. When you view your racing heart as a positive, energising response, rather than a liability, your body can respond accordingly. The stress response becomes an ally rather than an enemy.
This is an Edited extract from THE HARDINESS EFFECT: GROW FROM STRESS, OPTIMISE HEALTH, LIVE LONGER by Dr Paul Taylor (Wiley, $34.95), available at Amazon and leading retailers. Dr Taylor is a keynote speaker, podcast host and thought leader with post-graduate qualifications in psychology, exercise science, nutrition and neuroscience. Dr Taylor helps individuals and teams unlock the power of psychophysiological hardiness to perform at their best. For more go to www.paultaylor.biz
By DR PAUL TAYLOR
